The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett Page B

the delicate skeleton of “Lover to the Dawn” [6]. Its first two sections were retained intact, with another paean to Hermione fleshing out the previously instrumental opening. Once more, Bowie was “The Thinker,” * but now he eschewed romance in favor of a bitter excoriation of all those who had drained his energy, sapped his will, even exhausted his money: the price of his fame. From a defiant movement through the key of F, a rhythm guitar stabbing the third beat of every bar, Bowie gave way to self-pity, unloading himself across the familiar I-vi-IV-V chord progression (in C) that underpinned a thousand maudlin fifties teen ballads.
    And then the dance began again, with Hermione recollected as a touchstone of truth, before the betrayed Thinker was replaced by the voice of the crowd, ungrateful and unworthy, revealing their subterfuge like pantomime villains. Bowie’s language grew even more bombastic, passion replacing poetry, adding up to total condemnation of the values of the counterculture. One by one, the hollow slogans of the failed revolution were tossed aside, Bowie ranting like a robot dictator, the band chaotic in their excitement, an electronically treated harpsichord swaying from side to side across the stereo spectrum.
    Finally, Bowie escaped the tight four-chord restraints of the song with a desperate cry for freedom: “Live!” He had finally shed his illusions: having dominated his songwriting for months, Hermione vanished from his landscape. Even before he had become a star, Bowie had glimpsed the cannibalistic relationship between leader and followers, idol and fans, guru and disciples. Yet he was still drawn toward pursuing fame, influence, the trappings of a god—a tension that would haunt the decade ahead.
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    [9] MEMORY OF A FREE FESTIVAL
    (Bowie)
    Recorded September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP. Re-recorded March/April 1970; single A/B-sides
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    Five days after his father’s funeral, when he was “in a completely catatonic state,” Bowie performed at the Growth Summer Festival and Free Concert in Beckenham. It was the epitome of countercultural eclecticism: besides an array of folk and rock musicians, the event offered “a barbecue, exotic tea stall, poster & original artwork stall, Transmutation paper & magazine shop, candy floss, street theatre, puppet theatre, jewellery & ceramics stall, clothes shop, fuzz-nut shy, assault course, Tibetan shop, Culpepper herb and food stall, etc.” The Beckenham Arts Lab collective (alias Growth) had expanded in four months from a sparsely attended folk club in the back room of a pub to a celebration of summer optimism filling a local park.
    Growth organizer Mary Finnigan recalled that Bowie was “vile” that day, castigating his fellow activists as “mercenary pigs” because they had allowed the stalls to raise money for their activities—which was the avowed aim of the festival. “He hated us for it,” she said, “and I hated him.”
    Yet within three weeks Bowie had written and recorded “Memory of a Free Festival,” the anthemic climax to his second album. “We go out on an air of optimism, which I believe in,” he explained. “I wrote this after the Beckenham Festival, when I was very happy.” What he created was a fantasy, a melding of other people’s experiences of Beckenham with news reports of the Woodstock gathering in upstate New York that same weekend, filtered through a science fiction sensibility that passed control of earthly happiness from the hippies to visitors from the stars. It climaxed in a simple chant, inspired by the elongated ending of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” the previous year, which celebrated the arrival of the Sun Machine, inaugurating a party that would no doubt stretch out into the galaxies. *
    Amid the celebration, however, Bowie acknowledged that this was all fiction—one with which he was